5 Things to Look For Before Accepting Terms & Conditions

Is your corporate data at risk? Before uploading sensitive information to cloud services be sure to review these terms.

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Those pesky terms and conditions, who bothers to read them? It was recently estimatedthat to read all the privacy policies the average person agrees to on a daily basis, it would take 250 hours per year. Easier just to skip ahead and accept.

If you did read the terms, you might be surprised to learn a lot of widely used cloud applications have agreements that do not favor end users. Far from benefiting the consumers, these companies want a privacy policy as permissive as possible. They are often designed to lessen the service provider's liability if a user's privacy is violated, and in some cases secure the right to sell user information and turn a profit.

The agreements are often long, in vague legal text that leaves even the most determined policy reader unsure of their rights. And unfortunately, while legal authorities recognize users rarely read the terms and agreement, it is done so at their own risk.

So to protect yourself and corporate data, the best approach to reading or skimming terms and conditions may to be narrow in on the sections most likely to impact corporate security.

To help protect your business from accidental security risk, Skyhigh Networkspulled together 5 essential user agreement terms to look out for when signing up for a cloud service.

Becca Lipman is Senior Editor for Wall Street & Technology. She writes in-depth news articles with a focus on big data and compliance in the capital markets. She regularly meets with information technology leaders and innovators and writes about cloud computing, datacenters, ... View Full Bio